I've been looking through some of the best Moodle modules out there recently to add to our portfolio. One area where I've always felt that we have lacked is on the video side of things. Yes, the filters in Moodle can sort YouTube out no problem, but there isn't an easy way for you to add video in.
Step forward Media Player. The description mentions that it is the successor to the old FLV Player for deploying video within Moodle courses. To be honest, there is enough of the necessary and basic functionality in there that you would expect, and it ticks all of the boxes. It runs well, and I've not yet spotted any bugs with it. I should imagine that the only stumbling blocks with this that users will encounter will be trying to work out whether or not they will be allowed to use the video as per the license terms and conditions, and also making sure that the video uploaded is less than the current max upload setting of 128mb that I impose. I might consider upping this to 256mb, but I still don't see the broadband in this country being ready to handle large streams of data.
Then there is the other issue of our Internet connection to our site. We currently have a 100mbit synchronous connection which will more than happily handle several streams outbound at any one time, as well as our normal web traffic. Is this sustainable though? I'm going to wait and see! I might just throttle the site through IIS so that it doesn't impact on other services.
The other module is the Poll block. Very simple, very effective and easy to use. This is what I feel is the kind of thing that staff want to use to deliver a course. It's also interactive, which generally translated means that students will also like it.
As you can see from the image above, it makes a nice little bar graph to help show the responses instantly. I would recommend these two highly.
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